Making Connections, Creating Opportunities

When AJ isn’t worried about being persecuted for doing extra homework, I think he really enjoys Latin. He seems particularly interested in the ways in which Latin intersect with real life. I’ve been going out of my way to point out Latin roots, not just in our Latin lessons but also when we’re reading out loud or even watching TV. AJ was reading one of his 90 gazillion books about space the other night and he got a look on his face that suggested a bulb had just burned on over his head. “Mom, does ‘astronaut’ mean ‘sailor to the stars’? Because it sounds like astra and nauta.” Exactly right, AJ. Suddenly language is seeming more meaningful to him, imbued with history and poetry.

At our parent-teacher conference last week, I mentioned to his teacher that I’m teaching him Latin at home and this week his spelling list was drawn from words related by common Latin and Greek roots. Coincidence? Maybe. AJ’s not the only kid that gets the challenge words. But they weren’t the words on the regular challenge list. I think she made the list because she knew we’d been working on it. Big points for the teacher in my book.

Yesterday, when we sat down to do Latin, I could tell AJ was tired and not so into it. I turned to the next story and he groaned. It was long. We started to translate, but he was getting frustrated with all the new vocabulary and with the fact that he kept forgetting some of the little words that come up all the time. I slammed the book shut. “Let’s try something different.”

We’ve been flying through the textbook and are nearly done with it already. He picks things up so fast that it’s easy to do, but with language, you need processing time. I think it’s time to slow down and try some new things.

I sat down at the kitchen counter and wrote out the words to the first verse of “Adeste Fidelis.”

“Do you recognize this, AJ?”

“Hmm. I think it looks kind of familiar.”

“I’ll sing it for you. Maybe it will sound familiar.”

So I sang the verse. He recognized it, but didn’t remember the words in English or in Latin. I turned him loose to translate it. He’d had almost all the vocabulary. I just had to coach him through the imperative verb forms. He wrote his translation out. Then I wrote out how we sing the carol in English and we talked about some of the things you need to do when translating poetry or song lyrics that are different than just a straight translation. He was fascinated.

And then we sang it together, first in English, then in Latin.

“Are we done?” he asked when we finished.

“Yup.”

“That was more fun than regular Latin. Can we do it again?”

Lucky for me there are plenty of Latin carols to draw on this month. And as soon as we dig out the Christmas decorations, we’ll work on my Latin copy of How The Grinch Stole Christmas. That’s going to blow his mind.

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Yesterday’s study session was at an interesting intersection between a couple of different trains of thought I’ve been pursuing this week. One is an email exchange I had with our school district’s curriculum director. I’d sent her a link to a project of the Society for American Music that seeks to help teachers to use music in teaching American History. They are running a training institute this summer and have already got a website up with helpful links and suggestions for specific ways to incorporate specific pieces into history curricula. The site will eventually have lesson plans as well. I’m really excited about this project, as was the curriculum director. At a juncture where many schools are axing their music programs, this kind of approach seems very promising. If I can teach music in Latin, surely we can teach it in History. How else can we blend the arts into the mainstream public school curriculum?

It also came up in my meeting this morning with the director of the gifted ed program at the local community college. We were sitting down to brainstorm ideas for bringing extra-curricular classes into our public school district and were considering waysto construct classes that would a) appeal to a lot of kids, b) be rigorous enough that parents would pay for it but would also c) be fun enough that the kids would be enthusiastic to functionally extending their school day. So we were thinking: what makes classes fun? Mixing the arts into other subjects is one of the things we came up with.

I’m not sure I really have a point here. If I do, it’s maybe that it’s easy for us musicians (and educators too) to think of the arts as an end in itself, but it they are also valuable as a methodology. AJ got both language and music yesterday. And history too, because I took the opportunity to talk about classical Latin vs. church Latin when he asked why there were so many Christmas carols in Latin.

However, I’m not sure how I’m going to explain Quomodo Invidiosulus Nomine Grinchus Christi Natalem Abrogaverit.

Afterschooling update

With bigger classes, no gifted and a shorter school day, AJ and I decided to do some after school homeschooling. While some of it involves enhancing his daily lessons especially in math, most of our time is spent on learning a new language.

The language AJ picked was Latin. I’m not sure why he decided Latin was a good one but I was happy about it because a) I had Latin in school and b) I’ve been wanting to relearn the grammar, which I seem to have largely forgotten.

I have to admit, I did not do a whole lot of research into curriculum. The homeschool pages recommending Latin curricula were almost entirely including Latin for religious reasons. And that’s just not us.

Instead, I picked the Cambridge Latin Course. I used the course in high school Latin myself and I already owned the first two books of the series, which saves us some big bucks. Plus their website has some helpful tools on it, including games and self-quizzes for every chapter. A warning, though, to those who use Chrome as their browser of choice: some of the components are not compatible. We switch to Firefox before heading to the site.

We’ve also located some online flashcards for the series, which let AJ study vocabulary on his own.

I’ve already written a little about what I like about Cambridge Latin. I was a little nervous about using it with a 9-year-old, but it seems to be working out well. He likes the humor of the stories – yesterday he learned how to say “dirty poem” (versus scurrilis!). I like the way the stories keep circling back on vocabulary so it’s easy to learn. And we both like reading the culture sections.

I wasn’t sure how the grammar issue was going to go. AJ’s had some Spanish in an after school program, but it was strictly conversational and largely aural/oral. They didn’t discuss things like conjugation or even much about masculine/feminine/neuter. But the book explains grammar so logically, with one main point per chapter (or “Stage” as they call it), that AJ is all over it.

The book is very translation oriented like many Latin books. But to keep AJ interested, we’ve been reading out loud and doing some of the translations orally, others written. I agonized for a while about pronunciation. In school, I studied classical Latin. But I’ve spent much more time as a singer working with church Latin so in the end, that’s what I decided to teach. I’m more familiar with it and less likely to make mistakes. And really, it doesn’t matter. I’m more concerned with giving him a connection to the language than about what it really sounds like.

Every chapter ends with an exercise that includes a list of English words with roots based on the chapter’s Latin vocabulary. You have to match the English words with their definitions. We’ve been using these exercises as a springboard to talk about English vocabulary, which has been fun. I’m not sure where I’m going with it. AJ’s been really interested in the Scripp’s Spelling bee, so maybe we’ll work on some vocabulary/spelling games as well.

So, so far,so good. I’m liking our afterschooling routine. Even with football practices every night, it seems to be working.

Classics

Last night I checked the school website for the first time in months. I noticed there was still a link for gifted, even though the program has been eliminated by budget cuts. I clicked it.

“Due to budget cuts, the gifted program has been eliminated. Any differentiation for students will come solely from the child's classroom teacher. If you have any questions you can contact XX, former gifted resource teacher.” The former gifted resource teacher will be teaching fifth grade this year. At another school.

In a week and a half, AJ will start fourth grade. We've decided to leave him in his current school and grade, at least for now. It will be his fifth and last year at his elementary school (our district starts middle school in grade 5). It’s the first year we will have no formal assistance with his curriculum, the first year class sizes will top 30 (AJ’s grade will be one of the most overcrowded at 34 per class), the first year with a 5.75 hour day instead of 6.5 hours. We don’t really know what to expect out of this year or even what to hope for in terms of teachers. There are just too many wild cards.

On Wednesday, the class lists will go up and on Thursday, we’ll be meeting with whoever will be AJ’s teacher for the next nine months. At this point, it’s kind of a formality. The school has an enormous file on AJ. But it makes sure that the teacher’s seen that file and lets us get a sense of what to expect and how we might be able to help with his curriculum. And the preparation for the meeting gives us a chance to think about what we want AJ to accomplish this year. Now that AJ’s getting over, I want to include him in some of the thinking. What does he want to accomplish? Does he want to do some projects? Learn something new? Have more time to practice piano or make some art?

We are trying to view this period of change as an opportunity. The shortened day gives us time to do more work at home, which may ultimately be a good thing. I've always thought a combination of public and home school would be good for him and now we have a chance to try it. I suggested to AJ that we work on a foreign language and he picked Latin. He’s had some Spanish, so he’s able to read some basics already. Thanks to Percy Jackson, he’s interested in mythology, which we’ve approached to date solely from the Greek side. But he knows the Roman names from his interest in astronomy. His fascination with all things disaster led him to do some reading about Pompeii, so he knows a little about the culture from there.

Although Latin is not my strongest language – I had several years of it in high school, but didn’t much pursue it beyond the Latin I use as a musician or during the time I was a music director for a schismatic Catholic church that did the pre-Vatican II Mass where everything was Latin but the homily. But I didn’t have to think twice about a textbook. We’re using the wonderful Cambridge Latin Course, which unlike many Latin texts, teaches it as if it’s a living language. There is a ton of cultural information in the books and lots of beautiful pictures. Although I used the book in high school, there is nothing here inappropriate for a bright nine-year-old. Best of all, the series’ website (see link above) includes online activities for the books, including a feature called “explore the text” which lets you read the texts in the book with the option of clicking on any word to get a definition. These materials are free. If you’re not confident enough teach Latin yourself, there’s even a distance learning option for a fee. We had our first lesson today. I’m hoping it holds his interest. We’ll let you know how it goes!